Let me confess. I live daily with the fear that, like Hector in Alan Bennett’s The History Kids, I am “not in the swim”. At the excellent dinner celebration of life, I’m on the children’s table, a mere viewer of the grown-up enjoyable. This is because, deep breath, I do not have a favourite gin. Yup, I know. If I were asked at a bar which gin I would like with my tonic, I would just stammer. That’s only the start. The truth is I do not have a favourite gin, because I dislike ALL gin. As far as I’m worried having a preferred gin would be like picking a preferred war wrongdoer, only with a greater effect on my life.
It’s even worse even than the time I confessed to not liking a negroni, that cruel and bitter slap of a mixed drink, a taste for which is suggested to mark you out as a fully grown sophisticate. In spite of all the hype the negroni stays a specific niche drink. Even if I don’t want to belong to the negroni-drinking gang, there’s surely another gang over there I can go hang out with.
Gin: today, that’s everybody’s drink. It’s like bindweed: bloody everywhere. Tesco has its own brand gin, as do Morrisons and Sainsbury’s. Everyone has an own-brand gin. You probably have one too. Is it called after a character in a Guy Ritchie motion picture? Something like Copper Head or Lone Wolf or Conker? Lots of are. But being ubiquitous is not the like being good. I do not like the hit of juniper and the dank hit of undergrowth wrenched from a fox-soiled hedgerow. You call it the taste of “botanicals”; I call it the taste of “musty leaf matter”.
As I analyzed the gin world, I was struck by how much of it is marketed as tasting of something other than gin
As the variety of available gins grew, typically marketed by happy fellas who simply took place to use flat caps every day and keep their woollen pants up with braces, prepared to celebration like it’s 1869, I became increasingly cynical. Gin production, I chose, was for individuals who want to get in the horny-handed world of “artisanal food crafting” but can’t be making with all that unclean countryside organisation. Gin is something you can “craft” in a city, around the corner from a great coffeehouse and a prepared supply of Korean chicken wings.
Can you smell my cynicism? It’s nothing as compared to what I stank of when I made the big discovery. As a male who discusses food and drink I’m indicated to know things however as ever, ignorance springs everlasting. Up until a year ago I had not quite clocked that frequently gin is just vodka to which stuff has been added. It is ruined vodka. Some gin producers do not even make the vodka. They purchase it in, then they destroy it. That’s awful since I love vodka; I enjoy its clarity and its cleanness. It was when I was considering this vodka love that I understood the issue. Flowery, juniper-sodden gin is just too intriguing, too multidimensional for me. I crave something duller, or at best a blank canvas upon which I can paint my own boozy story.
In this, I may be far less alone than I initially imagined. As I took a look at the gin world, I was struck by how much of it is marketed as tasting of something aside from gin: there’s quince gin and clementine gin. There’s watermelon flavour and chocolate orange flavour and lemon drizzle cake flavour. There’s Magical Unicorn gin liqueur from Aldi, which obviously tastes of marshmallow and candy floss, and Parma Violet gin from Asda, which should taste of nightmares. What none can taste of is gin. Is it possible that many people don’t in fact like basic gin at all? Maybe they just desire to come from a tribe? If so, then I enjoy to remain an outcast. You’ll find me over in the corner, alone, nursing a vodka.
This content was originally published here.